By Hank Hyena
Do your favorite politicians always lose because their supporters are outvoted by “all the stupid people voting for their stupid candidates”?
Have you realized that your lone vote - carefully researched and considered - is invariably cancelled out by a genetic moron who is terminally plagued with primitive memes? Who can’t grasp anything more complex than a simple alliterative jingoism? Are you resentful because you know you’re twice as smart as the imbeciles who elected the opposition?
I propose a reform that can repair this injustice. Let’s make our votes equal our IQ!
My plan is mathematically easy: if your IQ is 100 (the national average) you get 1.00 votes. If it is 149, your vote counts as 1.49 votes. If it is 72 you get 0.72 votes.
Employing my method, all intelligent voters who possess superior reading comprehension and cognitive deduction skills can enjoy ballot power that surpasses illiterates who flunked high school, sniffed glue, and have been diligently damaging their brains for decades.
I’m sorry if it sounds elitist, but please, regard my proposal rationally. We want our collective brain power to make the best political decisions, but “brain power” is not equally dispersed in all skulls. Therefore, let’s utilize the brain power efficiently wherever we can find it; i.e., IQ = Votes.
Every person would still get representation, its just that the vote of a genius will contain a little more impact than the vote of a mental defective.
My plan would promote education because IQs can be elevated 10-25 points through a wide variety of methods (deep breathing, keeping a journal, reading, studying, using acronyms, eat lots of antioxidants and large healthy breakfast, meditating, avoiding sugar, exercising, activating all your senses, using intuition, and memorizing with various memory systems). Nobody born with an IQ of 85 would be condemned for life to a mere .85 of a vote. Everyone would be encouraged to retake an IQ test if they wanted to improve their impact on society.
My proposal is shrewd, dynamic, and firmly meritocratic.
Note that this is not a serious suggestion by The Extropist Examiner, but rather a starting point for a discussion. If not this system, then why not? Is there anything else that may work better? Discuss below!
By Breki Tomasson
Every now and again, a video pops up that is simply so moving that it has to be shared. A few months ago, I shared with you a movie that discussed the scale of our world and the Universe we inhabit. Today, I’d like to share with you a short reading from Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”, as adapted by Michael Marantz.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
By Breki Tomasson
Roughly a year ago, I wrote an entry on another blog of mine entitled “The Fight for (Non-)Human Rights”. It was a simple enough thing, discussing a simple concept. I argued that alien civilizations and human-equivalent artificial intelligences would be appearing within many people’s lifetimes and that we needed to begin asking ourselves what sort of protection they would have under law. It was filled with questions that might seem inane but which will be commonplace in a hundred years. For example, assuming the concept of mind uploading and downloading and the situation where one has died but is “backed up” on a computer somewhere:
Assume my real-life granddaughter decided she wanted to give me a body again and had the express permission of her husband to do so? Imagine if my memories and knowledge could be copied into her fetus before birth, allowing me to be born into a young body already with a full life of memories? How old would I be? What would my legal birthdate be? What if the new body was a different gender than my original gender? Would I still be able to draw my pension? Could I vote?
When I wrote the article, I wasn’t expecting similar questions to appear so soon.
Circling the Internet today is a fascinating related story.
Apparently, whales and dolphins both possess a complex enough intelligence and culture to warrant personhood, and it should never be considered ‘right’ to hunt them and eat them. The homepage Cetacean Rights has been launched - and suffered massive bandwidth problems all day - and has emphatically declared ten beliefs regarding cetaceans of all sorts. Amongst them are “No cetacean is the property of any State, corporation, human group or individual” and “All cetaceans have the right to freedom of movement and residence within their natural environment”.
Now, it’s important to notice what is meant by identifying various non-human animals as “persons”. Quoting Margi Prideaux:
No-one in this emerging field is suggesting that dolphins be granted a right to vote, to hold a drivers license, or to receive a free and fair education. Such knee jerk arguments simply reveal a poor understanding of the core meaning of a ‘right’. The moral rights thesis simply speaks to the concept of equality – a right to equal treatment despite difference. We are simply discussing a basic right to life, the protection of individual liberty and the prohibition of torture (and possibly a right to redress for harm caused).
Giving non-human animals protection under law is not a new concept. Much thanks to the Great Apes Project, Spain has already extended human rights towards most primates (Sources: Guardian, Time)- including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans. Extending the same - or similar - rights towards cetaceans is, however, something new.
For many, the problem is philosophical. It is easy to look at a chimpanzee or an orangutan and see something similar to a human. We see them pick things up, examine them, scratch their heads and think of them as something almost human. A thirty ton whale is quite a different matter.
Despite all this, it’s good to know that there are people everywhere fighting for tolerance, respect and the expansion of what we consider to be basic rights to include non-human animals. The Extropist Examiner fully supports this endeavor and urges its readers to do the same.
by Hank Hyena
Endorphins refer to the 20 types of brain hormones that are produced in the pituitary glands and hypathalmus. When they’re released they give you a sense of pleasure and euphoria - they relieve stress, depression and chronic pain, they enhance the immune system and delay the aging process. Discovered in 1975, endorphins resemble opium, morphine, and cocaine because these drugs are endorphin-releasers - ”endorphin” actually means “internal morphine”.
Unlike drugs, the endorphins your body produces are free with no side effects. Here’s a list of twenty ways you can access this “natural high”.
